I am almost the opposite. Sims have always been hard for me to work with. With no inertial feedback, limited sight, etc. All of my actual flight time (less than 10 hours at this time) has been very easy and made MUCH more sense on what I need to be doing and when.

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I get the feeling the quality and expense of the simulator make a big difference.

I have flown nearly every FS since SubLogic 1.0 for the old Apple. I also hold a (now expired) sailplane license, have sat in the jumpseat of a 737-400, and a C-141, while in flight. On the 737 I enjoyed an hour up front, including the entire landing sequence and taxi to the ramp before I decamped back to my seat.

What I'll say, is FS's have the potential to teach the fundamentals of flight, if the student is paying attention and doesn't turn all the controls to the "easy" side. Unlink your rudder from your ailerons, turn on all the realism settings so your gyro wanders, manually set your IFR radios and instruments, and you have a fair idea of what cockpit management can be like. The dynamics of actual flight will be easy for some, difficult for others. Much depends on your eye-hand coordination, steady stomach, fear of heights, and intuitive attention to detail.

Spending months on an FS will prepare you for some things, especially ground school, air control and navigation issues (if all that's on), and the primary essentials of lift, drag, axis of control, slip/skid, stalls, spins, etc.

Cockpit time has no substitute, either for effective teaching, or the fun factor.

The thing about simulators is to take it as a fork in the road situation. Ask yourself am I ever going to want go on to actual flight? If there's that chance then I think most people's approach needs to changed. Playing around is fun, but one would have to, or should, apply oneself to a more disciplined approach because down the road you'll have a lot of techniques or styles that will really need some serious undoing, and there would be a good chance you'd be spending more time (and money) doing that than if you started from scratch. I've instructed in transport aircraft sims and I coach in swimming. I see people all the time who didn't learn the better swim techniques years ago, and some of them, most actually, have a real tough time changing. The people in the sim? Not so much. They started out with an intentional goal and made sure all their time counted before moving up to that aircraft.

He was hundreds of miles from civilization, lost in the burning heat of the desert.Second World War Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping took what little he could from the RAF Kittyhawk he had just crash-landed, then wandered into the emptiness.From that day in June 1942 the mystery of what happened to the dentists son from Southend was lost, in every sense, in the sands of time.

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He must have survived the crash because one photo shows a parachute around the frame of the plane and my guess is the poor bloke used it to shelter from the sun. The radio and batteries were out of the plane and it looks like he tried to get it working.

My dad dropped troops in N Africa during "Torch", after flying from England, through the Gibraltar straights, and over to their targets. They circled until the troops took the field so they could land. I asked what "Plan B" was.

He said it was to fly South and look for a flat place to set it down. :eek1

Fortunately, they didn't have to use that plan.

They did get captured twice over the next week, once by the Italians, then by the Germans, before the main body of troops came up from the beachead. He came home with a Baretta, which my son now has.

Several of the actions require 3-5 inputs through menus or modes or imbedded screens. That's not so good. Notice no one was going after them, attacking and defending oneself would really ramp up the workload (which seems high to me already) on those display systems. Moving some of those sub screens seems sub optimal, too. There was the FMS CDU like display too. You get everything in multi screen, often buried, displays.